The Apocalypse: 5 Things You Didn't Know

Are All These Earthquakes And Hurricanes A Sign?

Earthquakes and hurricanes are ravaging the Eastern Hemisphere this week, renewing fears about the apocalypse. But while we doubt that it really is all coming to an end, we think it's worth it investigating what ideas around end of the world are really about.

Throughout history, the idea of an impending apocalypse has persisted. Throughout, it has changed costumes many times, wearing fires, floods, frog storms, and even catchy sayings — remember Y2K?

Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz once advised us: "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today; it's already tomorrow in Australia."

Traditional visions of the apocalypse share at least a couple of general traits. For one, predictions are set for the near future. We are a selfish, self-serving life form, so if the end isn’t in our near future, we don’t care. To that end, the apocalypse becomes a handy tool of manipulation.

The second trait is the most obvious: Every apocalyptic prediction that has been made has failed to come true. When this happens, true believers are fast to explain why, often suggesting that the world took various steps, such as prayer, to curtail or delay the event. Sadly for them, if any prophecy alleged to be the word of God can be upended through simple human intervention, there’s only one conclusion: God sucks at executing his will.

Here are five things about the apocalypse that you may not know.

1- The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been wrong the most

The Jehovah’s Witness began in 1876 as a ”Bible Student” movement, but today it’s operated by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTS), a mess of a prognosticator. The WTS has predicted that the apocalypse would arrive in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1925, 1932, 1941, 1975, 1994, and 2004. In case you weren’t counting, they’re 0-for-13.

You might imagine that just one failed prophecy — much less 13 — would spell the end of any group, but according to Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, the opposite is often true. Festinger’s study found that a failed prophecy has the tendency to strengthen groups like the WTS. He argued that it can be impossible to convince someone with real devotion to their convictions that those convictions are somehow flawed, regardless of how unimpeachable the evidence. One reason is because the devotee is so invested in his convictions that any challenge to them is perceived as a call to arms to defend them. They can even begin to see this challenge as part of the prophecy.

2- 2012 looks like one hell of an eschatological year

A brief, incomplete survey of these prophecies includes the following:

An aspect of the polar shift theory claims that on December 21, 2012, a shift of the axis of the Earth’s rotation will bring a host of devastating natural disasters.

The Orion Prophecy is a book that claims the Earth’s magnetic field will flip-flop in 2012, causing mass chaos. The truth is that the magnetic field will in fact reverse at some point (it has done so many times), but this does not happen overnight.

According to algorithms extracted from the bible and mentioned in The Bible Code, a big asteroid will strike the planet in 2012. The Bible code is the belief that messages, warnings and predictions were encoded in the Hebrew bible by E.T. and his friends (who also gave us our genetic code). The decoding technique was described in a paper entitled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" by Professor Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University in Israel. Incidentally, supporters claim The Bible Code gives proof of Oswald’s destiny as JFK’s killer, and it also predicted the apocalypse… in 2006. Remember that one? Me neither.